A madman's rantings

While a meme, the idea of Overwatch 2 coming out is one of the best decisions blizzard could make.  It’s an untapped intellectual property that has brought together a lot of players who aren’t necessarily interested in FPS gaming. It’s precisely because of this vast array of players that it would be dumb to not put out more content in the OW universe.  A great deal of OW players would be considered casual.  They don’t care about the balance of the game or if cool new ability is viable at low and high ranks.  Its more about having fun and working together with friends.  Fans have been asking for a single player version to get more details about the OW universe and learn about their favorite heroes.  So, what do we know about OW2 so far? Most of the guesses about the game is that it’ll primarily be PvE which is following the current trend of PvE games and the return of couch co-op.   This would also address a lot of the complaints that OW has today, which is the high degree of to

Sticking with the current community topics let’s continue with our talk about tanks, my last post had a talk about what are some design points for a tank in overwatch.   A quick run down is that tanks need a good health pool to survive burst damage, a low but consistent DPS, conditional burst damage to feel fun and lastly a balance of shield and/or damage ability. The last common thread with tanks, and I’m sure will be a constant going forward in OW, is that tanks lack a significant range option.  With these general guidelines, what are we able to change on tanks to make them feel more balanced and/or fun?   Healthpools seem to be balanced, adding more armor is a possibility but with the armor change it doesn’t make the largest difference in today's game. My personal take on armor is that it serves two purposes.   The first is to protect a hero from specific sources of burst damage, which adds variety to hero design that I believe isn’t used enough.   The second is to give a

I'm not going to lie, i wanted to get a long blog post put out before the announcements this week but the "post" turned into a paper and i'm having a hard time cutting it down.  It contains a lot of discussion that i think needs to happen but let me just talk about 2/2/2 briefly right now. Currently Shanghai just won the OWL and took out the best GOATs teams one after another.  The more amazing fact is that they did it with their own type of DPS comp.  It shines a light on how teams are finally dealing with GOATs and learning how to take it down.  Its key to understand that what shanghai did wouldn't be allowed under the 2/2/2 rule set.  More players are starting to question the entire 2/2/2 push when options are out there and they work.  Blizzard is very close to achieving balance in their game if they can make some hard decisions.  The big question is, how do they balance tanks and i just wanted to briefly talk about them before getting my long paper out next

For this talk I'm going to briefly summarize 2/2/2, what the community and its leaders believe to be the advantages of it, and finally why I believe those reasons are incorrect and how this is a short term solution to an age old issue. Currently there's a large push to force 2/2/2 role queue onto the overwatch ladder and professional play.  For those of you that don't know what this means, the idea is that you would specify what role you would fill before queuing up on the competitive ladder. (DPS, Tank or Support).  Once in game you would have to pick a hero from that category.  A team would be locked into having two DPS, two tanks and two support heroes for every match. The main point for switching to this system is that you'd have more balanced games when queuing on the ladder.  Since your team is unable to run 4 DPS players you'd have some form of tanks and support in every game. The idea is that this would create a less toxic environment, allow for players

I went over this in my first post in 2017 and wanted to specifically call it out after seeing jeff kaplan's recent post .  To summarize it, he states they didn't expect maining and one tricking to be so dominate.  They expected players to be comfortable only playing torb on defense and never on offense.  This expectation sets the stage for why overwatch is so heavily toxic, why the meta is in such a bad place and why the game has all the balance problems it currently does.  I will be specifically avoiding concepts such as player/gamer mentality and hero loyalty that happens in other games for this blog. The first issue is that the post means they double downed on niche design, which is the same as fully committing to the concept of counters.  As stated before niche heroes are inherently a flawed design in OW.  This is because if a hero can win 100% of the time in its niche, then it's overpowered.  Heroes are weakened in their niche to a point that other heroes can still c

With this being part 1 of some changes i'd like to see i'd like to address the problem i see in Overwatch. With a new balance patch on the horizon a lot of people are hoping for goats to be removed.  The problem i have is that goats isn't the issue, its that players are forced to play with only one strategy. To be the bearer of bad news - goats is a legitimate strategy and should be an option.  We need to strive for multiple viable strategies on each map, not completely remove those that we don't like. If goats goes away then double sniper becomes the dominate comp, if we take that away then dive comes back.  This trend will take you back through the strong comps and leave you with the same issues.  A boring repetitive play style or being forced to play what is deemed "correct".  The most popular idea I've heard so far is that a ban system would fix this. While at first glance it looks like a good answer since you can ban a strategy out, it actually